Tuesday, May 23, 2006

The Bear in the Bubble

If my memory serves me correctly, Trevor's been sitting in the back of my closet for a couple of years now. In that amount of time, a veritable collection of knickknacks has built up around him, and it would probably have made Trevor the ruler of his own little kingdom if I had only remembered to take him out of his gift-wrapping.

Trevor's a bear, you see. He's around two feet tall, has a pink ribbon tied around his neck, and is most likely stuffed with some combination of cotton and foam. Trevor first came around as a present to one of my female friends from an unwanted suitor, and when she considered disposing of him, I pleaded for her to let the bear live. He's been sitting in the back of my closet ever since.

I'm sure we all know that time has a tendency to wear on stuffed toys. That's why Trevor was still swathed in his original gift-wrapping and hermetically-sealed plastic cover, and that's why Trevor was still in remarkably good condition when we unearthed him a couple of hours ago.

My sister was hanging around when I finally pulled Trevor out of his shell of bright-red wrapping paper, and on a whim, I posed him in front of the TV for her opinion.

She only spoke after a long, uncomfortable silence: "He has evil eyes."

I laughed. "It's not as though he's going to come around and kill us in our sleep," I told her. She had just watched an episode of CSI that took place in a creepy-looking doll repair shop, and her reaction did not surprise me in the least.

After a moment of reflection, however, I had to admit that she could have been right. I mean, how would you feel if you were rejected by your potential owner, saddled off with some literary loser, and stuffed in the back of a dark closet for two years?

You'd be homicidal, that's what.

Or you'd have a nasty aversion to bright light, at the very least.

Trevor, the bear with the evil eyes. He's probably plotting his revenge upon the rest of the world even as we speak. It just goes to show that you really can't trust stuffed toys, especially if they happen to big fans of Lillian Jackson Braun.

Ultimately, we did have to ask ourselves what we were supposed to do with the bear. Fortunately, I was still in contact with Trevor's former owner, and we ended up batting around quite a few ideas. There was the prospect of selling him off to a second-hand store (not likely to happen), giving him away to an orphanage (a nice default idea, really), or simply repackaging him as a present to some lucky kid (as opposed to buying them that Nintendo DS they always wanted, I suppose).

Luckily, everything became moot when my sister expressed an interest in adopting him (evil eyes and all). On the other hand, the possibility suddenly lost a lot of its appeal once I realized that her own room was already filled to overflowing with stuffed animals. As nice and cuddly as these things may look, you wouldn't want to be buried under a mountain of them.

That, and there was still the possibility of Trevor going all Charles Manson on us. It's not easy to sweep two wasted years of your life under the rug, after all. The way we saw it, it was only a matter of time before we would find him sitting among the remains of a roomful of stuffed toys with a knife in his hand and a hideous smile on his face.

Yes, we're going to keep him in that hermetically-sealed plastic bag for a little while longer, thankyouverymuch.

...

Hey... would anyone out there be looking for a stuffed bear, by any chance? We could let him go for a fairly low price, I suppose.

Just don't blame me if he does anything funny in the middle of the night.

Look at it this way: If you don't like the way he stares at you, you can always stuff him back into a dark closet for a couple more years.

Dude, you are so faaaaar off base. This is how it went down. Two years ago, a Heisenberg anomaly opened up in your closet creating a conduit between this state of the universe and another state of the universe - recently identified by scientists in Belarus as the ursus-saccharinus flux, or USF. The anomaly sucked in one of the inhabitants of the USF and trapped it in the body of Trevor. For two years, the USF-ian tried to bust out of Trevor, but could only manage to warp the fabric around Trev's button eyes, hence the evil glare. But despite that, the trapped USF-ian is actually pretty benign.

In fact, if those Belarussian scientists are correct, if you or anyone in your family ever encounters any sort of trouble, all you have to do is tear Trevor's plastic wrapping off, and it's put its paws on its waist, thrust out its tummy and yell "Carebear, STAAAAAAAAAARE!"

Of course, after two years in your closet, all it can probably spew out is dust bunnies and mismatched socks.

Daene: You've been reading too many fantasy stories, you say? You do realize that you're talking to a guy who posts stuff like this, right? :)

Myke: I'm on Chapter Nine at the moment, and so far it doesn't seem as good as some of the better entries in the series. It's one of the earlier ones, though, so maybe Braun was just getting into her groove back then.

Arashi-Kishu: Talk about coming from way out of left field... What brought this on all of a sudden?

About Me

Sean has been writing since he was 12 years old, and is a writer of essays and short stories. He writes mostly about life, logic and imagination in general: Sean writes, Sean writes about writing, and sometimes Sean even writes about writing about writing. Then, when he feels like scribbling down a few other things, he concerns himself with games and game design, some contemporary issues, and a few jabs at artistic design and authorship. He is a silent anti-plagiarism advocate, an occasional critic of modern storytelling, and a lover of stuffed toys. Given the right circumstances, he may turn into a homicidal maniac one day. Or even worse... an accountant.